Good Build, Good Karma

A new service on travis-ci.org picks up GitHub projects, runs new code through test suites, and notifies the owners if the build fails. Its API enables Perl scripts to gather historical build data, including who-broke-the-build tabulations.

Open source projects, especially, benefit from agile development methods involving continuous integration (CI). Any change of code in the public repository should immediately trigger a test suite run to draw the development community’s attention to any issues.

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With its easy-to-use web interface, GitHub can be put to totally different uses than archiving code. For example, Perlmeister Mike Schilli used GitHub to deploy a content management system for simple websites.

Instead of configuring the Jenkins continuous integration server in the browser with mouse clicks and text input for builds, programmers can store the necessary data in the source control system and let a Perl script do the work.

If you want to distribute your programs across multiple platforms, you need to prepare them to run in foreign environments from the start. Linux container technology and the resource-conserving Docker project let you test your own Perl modules on several Linux distributions in one fell swoop.